This essay focuses on the idea of money bills, why and how they’ve become valuable? Are governments to blame for the worthlessness of money? Are we deluded by the value of a piece of paper?
Historically, people have agreed on different materials and things to trade, sell , and buy goods. Starting with animal products of leather, teeth, or fur to exchange and moving into metals e.g. silver and gold. Being rare and unsustainable, metals have gained their value across history. Moving in time, people have started to depend on banks to store their gold in a safe place, exchanging it for cheques as a proof of their earnings. Moving in time, governments have started printing bills of money as a cover of their gold. Citizens have started to use those bills as an exchange to their services. In the 1970s, when the Vietnamese war had used up the American budget, the former U.S. president, Nixon, has decided to remove the dollar-gold cover to cover the costs of Vietnam war. In the same period, the U.S. and Saudi Arabian government have agreed to sell oil, the still-going most valuable energy source, only for U.S. dollars, which was later known to be the Petro-dollar agreement.
These 2 decisions have changed the world’s relationship with money forever. Instead of linking worldwide currencies with gold, it was to be linked with the U.S. dollar. Uncovered cap of money printing means more of it to be in the pockets of people, losing its value making the money worth less and less as time passes. The U.S. government is also one of the largest debt-giving nations; it also hosts the International Monetary Fund, a bank that is responsible to help nations in economic hardships with loans in exchange for political and economic reforms.
Moving in time, any economic crisis that happens in America e.g. 2008, affects the entire world as the U.S. government tends to control money printing and interest rate to maintain the economy in crisis. Moving in time, people have started to lose trust in banks and the economic system, with the devaluation of their savings, increase in goods, gold, and property prices. Among these hardships, metals were the goods to keep their value over time. People have started to invent cryptocurrencies whose value are undetermined as a hopeless solution to the current situation. There is no wonder that politicians are responsible for this human-money relation collapse.
In conclusion, people’s trust in the monetary system is reasonable. A major nation had the destiny of billions of people determined by a single decision that was made to make a political win in south Asia.